This is the national bird of Belize, the Keel-billed Toucan.
Howler monkey.
Brown pelican.
Royal tern.
Cahal Pech is a Mayan ruin located in San Ignacio, a town in the far western part of the country.
The night sky over Ambergris Caye with a small palapa on the horizon.
The beach on Ambergris Caye.
Sunset Beach Resort on Ambergris Caye.
Conch shell by the water.
There was some pretty good aquatic life right under the palapa at the end of the pier at Sunset Beach. The next few shots show what was living under there.
Here you can see all the fish under the pier, with a bit of the resort in the upper left corner. I was using an underwater housing for my DSLR. I will put some of the techincal info at the very end for anybody interested. Underwater photography is pretty new to me, so the results aren't what I had hoped for.
Lots of grunts under the pier.
A green moray eel that lived under the palapa.
A caribbean spiny lobster, also under the palapa.
A small squirrelfish hiding in the rocks.
A green moray eel in the Hol Chan Marine Reserve.
French angel fish.
Purple fan coral.
Brain coral.
Elkhorn coral with a small damselfish.
If you stuck around this long you must be bored or some kind of photo nerd. So here are some details on the underwater shots. Keep in mind I had no idea what I was doing going in, and still don't. I used a 'housing' from Ewa-Marine. It's actually more of a fancy plastic bag. It did the most important part of its job very well, my camera never got wet. I was using a D7000 with a Nikon 17-55mm f2.8 and an SB-600 speedlight. I also had an additional 3kg weight in the bag. The whole thing weighed a ton out of water, but still floated.
Controlling the camera was tough. A lot of reviews said you can't change settings easily, so shoot in auto or program. I found that you can change modes pretty easily, and even aperture while in the bag. My main trouble was keeping the lens at the focal length I wanted. The bag tends to compress the lens down to its shortest physical length which is 38mm. I really wanted to shoot at 17mm for those half water half air shots. That and the flat front element of the bag probably made it hard to get the effect I was going for.
I ended up shooting in aperture priority after playing around with settings. Looking back at my shots I probably should have used a larger aperture (f4), but focusing underwater is hard, so I was looking for more depth of field (f5.6-8). It's really hard to look through your mask, the bag, and then the viewfinder. What I did find helpful was back button focus. It was hard to feel the shutter button, so being able to use a button on the back of the camera to set focus without triggering the shutter was helpful.
A lot of the snorkling was pretty shallow water (3-8ft), so there tended to be pretty good light. I only used the flash for under the pier. I found the best way was to shoot all manual. I dialed in some basic settings f8, 1/250, ISO 400, and found a manual flash level that gave good results (usually 1/8-1/16). I ruined some potentially great green turtle shots on the first day thinking that I needed flash. They all came out overexposed becasue I was in aperture priority with the flash on TTL.
In the end I had to do a lot of white balance correction in post, and I had a lot of out of focus shots and motion blur. It isn't easy to get sharp shots with sediment in the water, plus both the camera and subject are usually moving.
